I MARCHED TO MY OFFICE, TRYING TO BURN OFF some steam and actually looking forward to Chucky's chipper voice. He was always good for a good laugh—and talking me down from a high building when my sniper's gun was loaded and aimed.
“Lynch?” the voice said. “O'Rourke here.”
Shit. Just what I needed—an irritating call from itchy Detective O'Rourke, a cop who could get lost on his own beat.
“Not today, O'Rourke. I'm cleaning my gun. Call someone else with whatever it is you're selling.”
“Oh yeah? Well, maybe I'll call your boss and see if he wants to take my call because you're just not in the mood.”
“Don't threaten me, you plague-infested fruit fly or I'll come over there for practice shots. Better yet, I'll torture you so bad you'll be begging me to pull the trigger—”
“All right, all right, calm down, will ya? The chief told me to call. Says he has something he needs to discuss with you ASAP. But maybe you should come in the side door. Incognito. Sunglasses and baseball cap. Comprende?”
“I comprende all right. What's the problem? The chief needs a real man over there, so he called me?”
“Hey, I'm just trying to protect your ass,” O'Rourke said. “Prance through the front door if you want and right into the chief's office. No skin off my nose.”
I hung up with O'Rourke, not bothering to analyze his suggestion for cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and headed out for another brisk walk across town in the viscous air of a sweltering August. At least the metallic smell of blood and body fluids still clogging my nostrils from my recent morgue visit would be snuffed out by exhaust fumes and freshly poured tar.
WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A WAVE TO THE DESK COP, I strutted boldly into the station and straight through to the elevators. The doors slid open to Chucky's floor and he was just rounding a corner when I hissed at him, “Chucky, I hope this isn't about Scott Boardman.”
He corralled me into a corner where about a zillion and two assorted criminals and their cop escorts glared at us like they were initiates of an elite social club and Chuck and I were a pair of ousted members.
“Mother of Christ,” Chuck said, “will you keep your voice down? I must be crazy getting messed up with you in here.”
I stuck my face into his twinkling baby blues. “Listen, Chuck, I'm getting myself in enough of my own trouble with this investigation. You've already screwed my heart into the ground, don't burn my job bridges too.”
The man actually looked surprised. Like what, this was news to him? Imagine me having a heart and then imagine him capable of breaking it.
He lowered his head. “Walk quietly to my office, where we can have a civil conversation without the whole force knowing our business.”
“Frankly, I don't care who knows, because I'm not married, Chuck. The adultery charge is hanging over your head, not mine.”
Chucky had stopped trying to reason with me. Smart man. He physically reminded me that even though my mouth may have been bigger than his, my strength was genetically limited by meager muscle mass. He gripped me firmly by the forearm and escorted me to his office like I was a Saudi Arabian female who'd left home without her burka.
“Now sit down and shut up for a minute,” he said pushing me through his door and slamming it shut.
“Can I smoke—”
“No!”
Chucky hated cigarettes, which is why his skin was still so flawlessly young for a man in his forties whose only grooming effort was a monthly haircut at Frank's Barber Shop for which he paid an obscenely minimal amount—something substantially less than the cost of a four-shot Venti Latte at Starbucks. Of course, as I always used to tell him, he had such a voluminous head of hair he could have shared it with ten bald guys and still had some left over to braid. Maybe it was his morning bowl of all-grain Cheerios and daily jogs, but Chucky was the poster boy for poster boys.
He pulled his chair up close to me, so despite his earlier gorilla posturing I knew this was going to be his stumbling macho version of a Hallmark moment. I slapped his hand away as he tried to take mine, and then, as I expected, he went directly into his you-know-you're-the-love-of-my-life-but monologue. The same soliloquy I'd heard enough times that I could recite it by heart. (If I only had a heart.)
“What do you want, Chuck?”
“Jake Weller is an old friend of mine.”
Jake Weller? I'd never heard this part of our love story before. What did Jake Weller have to do with our adulterous and deteriorating ex-love life?
“He's Boardman's PR guy. And Jake's singing a slightly different tune than Boardman on this.”
That's when Chucky's angle hit me. A clever variation on the love theme: Chucky was trying to turn me against Scott Boardman by proving to me that Boardman was lying and assigning him a minor character flaw that in this case led inexorably to the murder of two women.
I let a smile spread slowly on my lips but said nothing, making Chuck work a little harder for what he was trying to achieve—namely breaking the spell between Scott Boardman and me.
Chucky, intent on burying Boardman, dug his own grave a few feet deeper. “So you see, Shannon, Jake Weller is saying that Boardman called him that same night and told him that he thought he killed the wife and her friend but he doesn't remember it. That same bullshit story he gave you.”
As far as my tone-deaf ears were concerned, Jake Weller's tune and Boardman's song were in the same key. I was still waiting for Chuck's sour note.
He stood and walked behind his desk, staring at me, waiting for me to respond: fall into his arms and thank him for saving me from the black-heart Boardman, or, in the alternative, throw my chair at him and storm out. But again I remained mute and with the slightest tilt of my head let Chuck resume shoveling dirt in his own grave.
“And Jake doesn't buy Boardman's alibi either. Apparently, Boardman and this Stanford gal who's giving him the alibi were having an affair. I think Jake's scared of being somehow complicit in these murders, so he's asking me for a favor. Like he knows Boardman's career is over, so Jake's trying to save his own ass. You know what I mean? And maybe he wants me to go easy on Boardman. I mean, the poor slob probably did kill the wife in the heat of passion. I mean… I'm thinking… what would I do if I found you slobbering between the legs of another broad?”
Just for variation, and to keep from falling asleep, I straightened my head and tucked my chin in, because this nonsense Chucky was spewing didn't deserve much more than a yawn. There's no way the Charles Sewell I knew would go easy on some guy who murdered his wife, heat-of-passion notwithstanding and no matter how friendly Chucky was with this Jake Weller guy. And he might suffer a few sleepless nights, but Chucky would rat out his own brother if he knew the guy hurt a woman. But I was bored playing this game with Chucky, so I finally said, “Your buddy Jake Weller is playing with the facts. Scott claims to have called Jake Weller after he got off the boat and found the women dead, and Weller agreed to meet him at Al Forno later that night. And I was at the restaurant. Weller never showed. I don't know what Weller's claiming, but as far as I'm concerned, Scott's telling the truth.”
Chucky shook his head at me. He was probably confused. I know I was.
“You're gonna continue with this guy, aren't you? Making up all kinds of excuses for him. You don't care that he's a fucking liar—most likely a murderer—and a dirty politician to boot! I hope you're not doing it just to bust my agates, Shannon, because—”
I stood and walked to the door. “Get over yourself, Chucky. Believe it or not, most of my choices in life have nothing to do with you. I'm not your wife who thinks you walk on water—”
“Leave her out of this!”
“Fuck you,” I said calmly. “Marjory's never been out of this. It's always been you, me, and her. What did the dead princess say? ‘There are three of us in this marriage.’ Maybe it's time I took me permanently out of the equation.”
“Shannon, please. I'm just worried about you—”
“My ass you are. Mike McCoy is more worried about me than you are, and he's only worried because Marianna will blame him if anything happens to me. You, Chuck? You just don't want to lose. It's about me and Boardman, and the fact that we're attracted to each other, and that I don't think he's a killer. That's what this is all about. So you do what you gotta do, and I'll take care of my own business, which, by the way, is no longer any of yours.”
I walked quietly out of Chuck's office and slowly back to mine, thinking hard about what I'd just done—severed my relationship with Chuck Sewell, a man with whom I never fought until Scott Boardman entered the scene. Sure, we'd had our spats—and then the enhanced-by-anger make-up sex after—but was Boardman a catalyst for the real resentment I'd been hoarding for years against Chucky? Was Boardman what I needed to finally dump Chuck and get on with my life (such as it was)?
My anger was regressing dangerously toward an odd feeling of loss, a dark, unfamiliar place that Marianna would no doubt characterize as a “depressive state.” Other than the girls, and a pretty good relationship with my mailman, what exactly was my life? Nothing. It was nothing.
When I got off the elevators to my office, I was actually shaking. This depression crap was so not for me. No wonder Marianna was always questioning herself, afraid to make a wrong turn here or a right turn there. I felt a slight paralysis coming on, a weakness in my stalky limbs. Depression was like a car running on empty. Anger was the fuel I needed. So I started looking for a fight. Anyone would do, but I chose Vince, even though he was so insensitive to my assaults that it wasn't even any fun fighting with him anymore. He'd think we were just having our daily chat over the newest cases.
I stomped straight to his office, where I found Andy leafing through landscape design magazines. The place was deserted.
“Was there a bomb scare?” I asked him.
“Honey,” he answered without looking up, “I would have been the first one out. Your girlfriends are with the Pig at the Dial-up.”
“They went to the Dial-up dump without me?”
Andy looked up from his magazine. With narrowed eyes, he said, “Pig's invite. Are you okay?”
Back in the privacy of my office, I sat a minute, critically analyzing the strange tug in my chest. Was it a clinically diagnosable heart attack or was I just mad as hell? I dialed Marianna on her cell for an expert opinion. I felt a new simpatico with her, like we'd caught the same bug—the parasite of self-doubt.
Sure enough, Vince and the girls were having a powwow at the Dial-up Modem Diner. They'd had a late afternoon craving for pancakes and eggs, Mari explained, as a defense to their restaurant decision.
“I like pancakes too,” I said, my voice strangled by a strange choking sensation.
“Are you crying?”
“I don't know, Mar,” I growled, “tell me what it feels like and I'll let you know.”
Marianna then announced, as calm as a floating glacier, “So, okay, Vince is sending me to Newport tomorrow morning to interview the mother, Virginia Booth.”
“Why? Her chauffeur won't come to Providence?”
“Vince is trying to low-key the investigation, so I'm going to her turf. Oh… and… um… Pig said you probably shouldn't come.”
“Hey, Marianna, how are your fucking pancakes?”
Marianna and I had known each other so long that even over the wire I knew—without seeing it—that she was grinding her jaw.
“I'll meet you for a drink after,” she said, “to fill you in.”
“Hey, don't worry about me, okay? All this sudden interest in my welfare is making me claustrophobic.”
“Fine, Shannon. But hear this… Andy told us Brooke left the office Friday at noon. She had enough time to take a little drive with Boardman. In other words, she could be telling the truth about being with him. And if she knew we were going to Al Forno—just think about this—are you sure that Scott Boardman didn't plan on bumping into us—all AAG's—and entangling us in his web to set the stage for a one-act slam-dunk mistrial?”
I hung up on her before she could scratch another word into my wounds.
I had never been barred from a case before, always priding myself on my ability to remain neutral and unemotional—I was the one Vince recruited to finish the job when everyone else (read Mari) was making emotionally rash decisions. And what's worse, I'd hoisted this leprous condition on myself by falling in lust with a murder suspect and then stubbornly refusing to abandon the ill-fated affair. Sometimes life deals you a losing hand, and the meekest of us throws in her cards. I like to think I was made of tougher stuff. In the past nothing could scare me into dropping my jacks with someone just because he was suspected of being a bad guy. So my recent dip into the dumps notwithstanding, I was going to pull myself up by the bootstraps and straight into Scott Boardman's lifesaving arms, hell-bent on proving them all wrong.